The Unquiet Ghosts of Nazi Germany

Timothy W. Ryback,
the deputy director general of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale
in Paris and a founder of the Institute for Historical Justice and
Reconciliation in The Hague, is the author of Hitler’s Private Library:
The Books That Shaped His Life.

Paris
— The German mini-series “Generation War” made its American debut as a
film in New York City last month to generally favorable but notably
skittish reviews. One critic sensed an attempt to continue “the
self-deceiving lie” that the average German was a victim of Nazi rule.
Another saw in it a “work of apologia.” Writing in this newspaper, A.O.
Scott found himself in a “strange queasy zone between naturalism and
nostalgia.”

“Generation
War” traces the fates of five friends in summer 1941 Berlin cheerily
toasting their departure to the eastern front with the expectation of a
reunion back home by Christmas. The film ends with three of the five
returning four years later — more than four and a half hours in
cinematic time — to the war-ravaged ruins of Berlin to begin rebuilding
the Germany that Angela Merkel governs today.

The
film, which originally aired last March as a three-part series on
German and Austrian television under the title, “Unsere Mütter, unsere
Väter,” or “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” left some Germans feeling as
uneasy as A.O. Scott. A reader of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit was
particularly troubled by the portrayal of Polish anti-Semitism and
Soviet Army excess. “The depiction of our eastern neighbors reminds me
of Goebbels’ propaganda,” he wrote on a blog, invoking the Nazi-era
spin-meister, Josef Goebbels.

But
most of the 7.6 million Germans who watched the final episode, an
impressive 24 percent of all viewers that night, welcomed a film that
portrayed their “mothers” and “fathers” neither as heroes nor “monsters”
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but rather as a generation in their
20s and younger subjected to systematic indoctrination and gradual
“brutalization” to which they succumbed in myriad and horrific ways....